The No-Soup-Allowed Art of Movie Theater Menus

How the chef at Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema develops his movie-inspired menus.

Dine-in movie theaters are becoming more and more popular these days, and for good reason: They combine the magic of cinema with the convenience of not having to arrange to meet up with your buddies twenty minutes before the movie starts so you can wolf down a dry burrito and chug a bad beer. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the in-theater food is as much of a draw as the movie it's accompanying. Sometimes, if the movie is, say, gross and divisive, the food is way, way better.

For six years, the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn has been showing cool indie movies and serving up food and drinks without disrupting that experience. On top of their standard menu (the tots and queso will make you wonder why you'd ever order fucking popcorn again in your life), Nitehawk also offers dishes and drinks themed specifically around their film program. Right now you can order the Lady Bird-inspired "Sacrament of the Body", essentially a California-themed bruschetta complete with "non-consecrated" communion wafers (water crackers), or a plate of "Doughnuts for Dixon", a tribute to Three Billboards's Officer Dixon, and a riff on one of the many resilient stereotypes attributed to incompetent police officers.

GQ caught up with both Nitehawk's in-house chef Kurt Applegate and beverage director Matt Walker, to find out just how they come up with some of their movie-inspired menu items, and the one type of food you'll never, ever find in a Nitehawk cinema.

GQ: Tell me about the process for developing your menu. Do you watch the films and see what inspires you? Are other people involved?Kurt Applegate (Executive Chef): Yeah, I'll either watch a screener at home or go into the city to see it. I look for distinct food and beverage reference cues, but also in the setting of the film. Where does it take place? Is there a quote that we can use for the name of the special? I take observation notes and e-mail them to the rest of the chefs (at Nitehawk) and managers, then we'll riff on some ideas until we land on something.

Matt Walker (Beverage Director): The collaborative nature of our team helps tremendously. We'll bounce ideas off of one another until something sticks. After kicking around some bad ideas and horrible puns for a few days, hopefully, we'll land on something that will resonate with the customers.

Let's talk, for instance, about the "You're Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!" (BBQ Buffalo chicken, smoked gouda, fresh pineapple, red onion, cilantro, house made flatbread), which is obviously attached to The Disaster Artist. Can you walk me through the process for that?KA: There's a scene in The Disaster Artist where they're eating at—what looks to me like California Pizza Kitchen. We decided to do our own rendition of a CPK signature pizza. The name came easily since it's the best-known quote from The Room and you can, you know, tear it apart.

What are the limitations of creating meals like this?KA: We have to take a few things into consideration: Is it easy to eat in a dark theater? Is it messy? Is it seasonal? We don't like to do things that require an extensive amount of cutting, like a steak.

Presumably, noise is also an issue.KA: Yes. You won't ever find soup on our menu because nobody wants to hear slurping during a movie.

Can you tell me about any cool ideas you've had that you weren't able to implement?KA: My Chef de Cuisine, Stewart Gary, had an insane idea for a pizza egg roll, which sounds amazing, right? Fresh mozzarella and pepperoni inside with a marinara dipping sauce. It didn't work out, the cheese hardened too fast. But it's still fun just to rock out a lot of fun ideas.

MW: We've had a few ideas that probably pushed the boundaries of good taste. I won't go into details about those but I'm glad we work with intelligent people that consider all the angles. For The Florida Project, we wanted to create an alcoholic version of an Orange Julius, but the combination of the heavy cream and acidic orange juice caused the slushie machine to churn the product into a delicious orange flavored butter instead.

Which of your favorite films would you want to create a menu for that you haven't yet?KA: I've always wanted to do a menu for Dumb and Dumber. "Why don't you eat up and we'll tell ya'..."

MW:Chinatown, just because I love that film so much. Or Royal Tenenbaums because the aesthetic is so distinct. We have a bi-monthly tasting menu series called Film Feast where we work with strictly repertory films so hopefully, we'll get to do them someday.

A film I saw recently that I liked is Harvey. Here's a quick description I found: "Due to his insistence that he has an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit for a best friend, a whimsical middle-aged man is thought by his family to be insane—but he may be wiser than anyone knows." Would you do me a favor and come up with something I could serve the next time I show it to someone?KA: Ah, good old Jimmy Stewart! The obvious choice for this would be something with carrots. Perhaps roasted carrots, tempura carrots or a salad with carrot-ginger dressing. If you wanted to get literal and bizarre, you could serve up rabbit. But that might be taking it a little too far.